The South Transept Window, St. Lucia at Lowhampton

Who ever thinks this is impossible shall only have a look on the glass, which is similar to you — Monk of the Abbey of St. Mary and St. Nicholas at Arnstein, 
 late twelfth century, tr. by Roger Rosewell 1 In the high left light there’s a bombast figure of the iconoclast Harley — titled Chairman of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry — in operation mid 1600s. In forgiveness is lightly engraved in the grisaille glass near the base. His jig-on-coals is illumined to the foot: in the light below, skin-fierce shards of thousanded glass are oblite against an anvil road black as a telly that’s off. 2 Here the sanctity of the inextinct is vitrified. (There is in this, of course, the trick of the numinous, which apertures the mind then shutters it with a captured click.) The second window is abstracted into a green / yellow / red that’s near tessellated at points, yet at its edges approaching random generation like a screen saver projected. It is infernal. This color chart dispersal, that’s disordering or reordering. 3 Then a spurt of leading leads out of the plaster tracery, these cames a cooled ore rooting Lowhampton’s industry to a silica-limed wall — and the metal hid within a retrace of all the city’s greatness that’s gone before. Though now is lost. There is at last the moving off from the abstract; a tilting to the concrete: it seems, right here, that a hundred buildings are storied in stone-thrown perspective. A city reinvented. 4 In four: a clear-paned gemmail connecting like-to-like, with no change of  tint or shape, no supporting leadlight. It’s as if it were a house window. Or something from an office block. It does not create or stain but gives an outside falling past Sainsbury’s and the Sander Tower looming, then the ring road communioned traffic forming. An open room pupiled towards rain in its rain-tone, the study of an unaltared sun.